Simulation Budget Allocation for Further Enhancing the Efficiency of Ordinal Optimization

Abstract. Ordinal Optimization has emerged as an efficient technique for simulation and optimization. Exponen-tial convergence rates can be achieved in many cases. In this paper, we present a new approach that can further enhance the efficiency of ordinal optimization. Our approach determines a highly efficient number of simulation replications or samples and significantly reduces the total simulation cost. We also compare several different allocation procedures, including a popular two-stage procedure in simulation literature. Numerical testing shows that our approach is much more efficient than all compared methods. The results further indicate that our approach can obtain a speedup factor of higher than 20 above and beyond the speedup achieved by the use of ordinal optimization for a 210-design example